


Two Months

by allyarra



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-16
Updated: 2013-07-16
Packaged: 2017-12-20 09:58:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/885905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allyarra/pseuds/allyarra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mako learned to handle her fears through the count of the war clock. After the war clock stops she finds other ways to count the time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Months

Two months after the end and Mako has managed to regain her emotional control. The Marshall is gone (her _father_ is gone, the only father she can really remember) but she didn’t lose everything on that terrible and wonderful day. It has been two months and she no longer wakes up in the morning wondering if she even has the strength to get out of bed (she always does, but that doesn’t mean much, Stacker has, _had_ , raised her too well, she always gets up and faces the day). Mako has made it two months and she is beginning to believe that it will not be long before she will stop measuring the future, the amount of time she has left on this world.

She has lived so long by a war clock that the idea of living with no clock hanging over her head, no prediction of doom (of living nightmares that have torn her personal world apart more than once even if they didn’t manage to take the physical world) that she has to consciously try not to think about it. Raleigh teases her about it sometimes, that she’s still counting the time until the next kaiju appears, but they both know what she’s really counting. After all, he’s counting too, just the same as her. They’re counting how long it’s been since they’ve drifted, how long it’s been since they last shared minds and put on a suit of armor strong enough to both save the world and to shut it out.

It took two days before they ended up sleeping in the same bed after the end, the only pair of pilots left in the whole damn world. She clings to him in her sleep even if during the day she maintains her reserve. She knows he doesn’t mind, knows that although it’s been two months, he still knows everything inside her head, just as she knows his head. It is so very intimate that sometimes, when the pretty reporters that she knows he would have once slept with ask them about it she’s not able to polish over the jagged edges that appear in her voice as she answers the question (she says that it’s too difficult to explain, that she doesn’t have words for it, Raleigh smiles and tells them to go to hell, knowing that’s what she wanted to say).

Still, it has been two months and Mako believes in the future again, no matter what the scientists say about potential future incursions (she believes them, but she also believes that it will be long after she is dead that the kaiju come back, for now, all she can do is rebuild). She has begun to have ordinary fears again, fears that she has not had since she was a little girl (fears that make Raleigh smile and kiss her forehead because he knows what it means to her to have these ordinary fears again).

Mako has never forgotten that there are more ways that a life can be cut short than by a kaiju (her father has always been an awful reminder of that) but somehow she has forgotten just how fragile a human really is. She thinks (desperately wishes) she could have done without the reminder, but she has it. The image of Raleigh sitting in a twisted heap of metal (a _car crash_ , he survives an entire war and this might be the thing that takes him away, this _every day, terrible accident_ ), blood dripping slowly down his face, fills her mind and she lets out a choked sob. Mako has survived two months and suddenly she’s not so sure that she’ll make it another two.

She sits in a private room in the hospital because the press and fans and all manner of people who will hound her are in the waiting room, are surrounding the hospital, desperate for news of the man who saved them all and she cannot face them. She cannot do anything but watch the clock tick slowly by, counting the minutes that have passed, the minutes that Raleigh has lived since they tore her from his side upon arriving at this godforsaken place. There are others in the room, she knows this, but she can’t hear them, can only hear the tick of the clock. Mako has lived by a war clock since she was a little girl and for some reason the tick of an ordinary clock in an ordinary hospital seems to hold the same weight.

When the doctors enter she doesn’t get up, she stays sitting as the others rush to her feet. She can’t bring herself to move, fear keeping her frozen in place, and then they smile and say that he’s pulled through and the flood of relief is so strong that she hasn’t the strength to get up. They say that he can have one visitor and no one questions her right to go, no one even tries. It takes two false starts before she can stand and even then she’s a little shaky but she does her best to hide it. These men might be her friends, but they are not privy to her pain and she will not bare it to the world. Only one man has the right to know everything that she is and has been and she will not grant that right to anyone else (she doesn’t have to, not now, he’s _alive_ and she knows she’s felt this before but somehow this time is so much worse, because this time she hadn’t been prepared).

Raleigh is sleeping and hooked up to so many machines when she walks into his room but his hand is warm and his chest rises and falls each time he takes a breath. Mako sits at his side, holding his hand, and stands guard for him because she knows that he needs her to do so (she needs to do it for him). She sits there and begins counting again, counting how long he has been asleep, because she knows now that she will count for the rest of her life because it’s how her father taught her to cope with fear and these ordinary fears that plague her now are just as real as her terror of kaijus.

It has been two months since the end of the war and seven hours since her co-pilot (friend, lover) was injured in a near-fatal car crash. Mako counts and she waits, knowing it won’t be long until she  has to reset the clock (but somehow she hasn’t given up her hope that the next event will be a happy one).


End file.
